The Man Behind The Mask — Square Ball 28/5/26

Balaclava Man

Written by: Rob Conlon

David Ekin can still remember the exact moment his friend Andy Metcalfe fashioned the makeshift balaclava that became one of the defining images in Leeds United’s history.

“It was February 1975,” Ekin says over a cup of tea in the living room of his home in Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire. “Middlesbrough away. We won 1-0, Allan Clarke scored. A load of us went up on a train from York and we stopped at Darlington. It was early in the morning. I think the pubs opened at half ten, so we got into this boozer and we could see Andy on his own in the corner up to something. He had his woolly hat and he was smoking. He came up with the idea of burning two holes in it so he could see, and then burned a hole for his mouth so he could keep smoking.”

Ekin was friendlier with Metcalfe’s younger brother, Rob. “Andy wasn’t really a big mixer with the lads,” he says. “He was a bit of a lone wolf. You had to keep an eye on him because he was always up to something.” But they were all part of a wider group of mates who travelled around the country following the best team in Europe home and away.

Football in the 1970s could be violent on and off the pitch. “When you went to watch Leeds them days it was almost as if you had a target on your back,” Ekin says. “Most times you either ‘got run’ or you ‘ran’ somebody else. It was much of its time.”

Not that Ekin bought into the idea of Dirty Leeds. He was a disciple of Super Leeds.

“When you saw them live, they were unbelievable. I can’t stress enough how good Bremner and Giles were in midfield. It annoys me a bit — I’m half proud and half annoyed when people talk about the tiki-taka football that Spain played like it was a new thing. Leeds were playing that in ‘72. They could all play football.”

Ekin turned 18 years old during the 1974/75 season and was working as an apprentice bricklayer in Boroughbridge, where he has lived all his life. “They used to put buses on to Elland Road from Boroughbridge,” he says. “You could get there and back on the bus plus your ticket into the ground and a programme for a quid. My first game was the 1969 Charity Shield against Man City at Elland Road. I remember getting chased by a group of Man City fans and one of them actually had an axe.”

He came up with the idea of burning two holes into his hat so he could see, and then burned a hole for his mouth so he could keep smoking

By the time Leeds began their fabled assault on the European Cup, Ekin had already experienced his fair share of ups and downs — winning league titles and the 1972 FA Cup, defeat in the ‘70 and ‘73 finals, robbery in Salonika in the Cup Winners’ Cup. Not to mention Brian Clough’s 44 days as manager.

“I was dead against Clough,” he says. “I detested him. This has nothing to do with The Damned United, which by the way I think is a load of rubbish. I got the impression that he was nothing but a bully. It was a bad choice by the Leeds board. I remember at the time all the fans wanted Giles to take over because that was the natural progression.

“Some of the players Clough signed — McGovern couldn’t lace Billy’s boots. The atmosphere around, it just wasn’t right. It wasn’t our team anymore. The majority of them were our players, but it was Clough. I think he was trying to stamp his own identity on it. It wasn’t working. There were some awful games.”

Jimmy Armfield, however, was a completely different story as he guided Leeds on their route to the final.

“I had nothing but admiration for Armfield, because I loved the way he put the players first. It wasn’t the players picking the side — I think Armfield had a bit of a tough streak to him — but he was very much about the players. They were quality players and a lot of them were coming to the end, and I think that was the kind of manager we desperately needed at the club.

“I remember the quarter-final against Anderlecht mainly because of the fog, but the semi-final against Barcelona at home lives well in the memory. That was Cruyff’s team and I was a big fan of Dutch football at that time. I loved the ‘74 Dutch team that got to the World Cup final. I really liked Cruyff, but he was disappointing at Elland Road. It was Neeskens who stood out for Barcelona a lot more. I was gutted — not that Leeds won, but that Cruyff kind of didn’t turn up that night.”

After a 1-1 draw in the Camp Nou booked Leeds’ place in the final in Paris, Ekin and his friends pitched their money together to pay for two of their group to join a coach trip to the Parc des Princes stadium for when the tickets went on general sale. Having secured eight tickets, they got straight back on the coach to travel back to Boroughbridge. “Would I have gone if I hadn’t got a ticket? Probably.”

While two other friends were lucky enough to win two tickets, flights, and a hotel in a competition through the Evening Post, Ekin was part of the group of eight who hired a van and drove to Folkestone on the south coast to catch a ferry to France — although there was a surprise before they even left Yorkshire when the lads driving the van rocked up to reveal they had painted LUFC graffiti all over the vehicle.

“We knew nothing about it. We had the shock of our lives. They thought it was hilariously funny. We kipped in the van in Folkestone the night before getting the ferry. Me and a mate slept on the roof because of the smell in the van with six other lads in there. We had to leave it in a car park before getting the ferry and realised it probably wasn’t a good idea to leave a van covered in ‘Leeds United’. Would it be in one piece when we got back? It took eight of us three hours to delicately chip the paint off. We got it all off, although the lads who hired the van had to take it back at dusk because when the sun shone on the van you could still see ‘LUFC’.”

Arriving in Paris the day before the game, they made “liberal use” of the metro to visit the tourist sites, before bumping into some Leeds fans in a bar.

“It was absolutely glorious. The weather was fantastic; it was red hot. We were singing all the Leeds songs. There was this kid sat there on his own, probably about 20 years old. He was obviously supporting Leeds, but he wasn’t English. He was an Austrian lad called Josef. He’d come from Austria to try and get a ticket for the final, so we befriended him and got him a couple of beers. The next thing you know he brings out this mouth organ and starts playing this Austrian folk music. We were asking him to play something we could all sing along to but he said he didn’t know anything. Then he said, ‘Ah, yes. I’ll play a song that you all know.’ It was Silent Night. We’re there, 27 May, thirty Leeds fans in the middle of Paris singing Silent Night. It was absolutely fantastic.”

The only problem was that the group of Leeds fans originally in the bar didn’t realise that on the continent you get presented with the bill when you’re about to leave, and assumed they’d been drinking for free all afternoon and evening. When the bill arrived and everyone realised just how much had been supped, they did a runner, meaning Ekin and his friend ‘Smig’ were separated from the rest of the group. “Two of the lads got lifted, but they got let out in the morning because they had nowt to do with it.”

They were the lucky ones. At least spending a night in a police cell meant they had a roof over their heads. The competition winners in the hotel aside, nobody had anywhere to stay. Some slept in a multi-storey car park. Ekin and Smig tried to sleep in an underground metro station to keep warm, only to find it was shut, and eventually found a roundabout in front of a hotel that had been transformed into an island surrounded by water and palm trees. “They had all these big spotlights shining on it so we jumped over the water and slept on the island with the lights on. It was lovely and warm. It was a tropical island!”

On the Wednesday morning Ekin and Smig reconvened with the rest of the group at the hotel. Paris was soon overtaken by Leeds fans, although he only remembers a couple of small skirmishes with Bayern Munich supporters. “Nothing too much — it was surprisingly low key really.” By now Metcalfe was wearing the balaclava that had become his trademark ever since the away day in Middlesbrough, and soon got involved in a cultural exchange of sorts with some Bayern fans.

“A lot of them were wearing lederhosen and doing this dance where they slap each other’s legs and backsides and all that. So Andy decided to have a go and unfortunately got on the wrong side of the Germans. I think he was slapping their legs a bit too hard.”

Once again, the group were separated inside the stadium. Ekin was in the lower tier of the Leeds end with Smig and Metcalfe, while two others were in the Bayern end, which by the end of the night might just have been the safest part of the ground.

“The game itself, I can remember that we seemed to totally dominate it. The pitch looked awful, really bobbly. The penalty, if I remember right, was at the far end from us, but it looked like a penalty all day. I just couldn’t get my head around why he didn’t give the penalty.

“Wherever you went with Leeds there was always a kind of belief that we’d end up getting robbed somewhere along the line. I can understand why the goal was given offside because at that time offside was offside, but it was the penalty that I couldn’t understand. It was such a stone cold penalty.

“It was a strange atmosphere and a very strange game. It was almost dreamlike. Well, I say dreamlike. It was a nightmare. When Bayern scored it was that sense of, ‘Well here we go again. We’re going to get done again here.’ It was like all the life had been drained out of the game.”

Being a Leeds fan is built on heartache

Of the trouble at full-time, Ekin remembers almost being hit by a seat — but he didn’t hang around long enough to wait and see what might happen.

“Breaking seats isn’t my bag. I was so crestfallen. It was terrible. I didn’t see much trouble. I ended up on my own on the metro. I bumped into this kid from south Hull who I met earlier in the day. I didn’t really want to be with him because he was a bit of a headcase. He didn’t have a ticket and when he tried to buy a ticket off a tout they went into a toilet and the tout pulled a knife on him. The kid from Hull was a big lad and took the knife off the tout and stabbed him in the leg. He took all his tickets and then went around saying, ‘Anyone want a ticket?’ I’m on the metro and get a tap on the shoulder and he says, ‘We should stick together.’ I thought, ‘God almighty.’”

The only consolation was that it had been decided all ten of the group would sleep in the hotel after the game, providing some relative comfort in comparison to a multi-storey car park or tropical roundabout. Metcalfe, however, had one last trick up his sleeve.

“The morning after we were all waiting to go down in the lift because I think we were on the 22nd floor. There were three lifts and we were waiting for the middle one when Andy said, ‘You won’t be able to use that lift, it’s out of order.’ Somebody said, ‘No, no — it’s coming up.’ Andy kept insisting we wouldn’t be able to use it. The next thing the doors opened and the lift was full of carpets stacked up from floor to ceiling. Andy had been up all night going on every floor, rolling all the carpets up and sticking them in the bloody lift. Just for fun.”

Fifty years on, Ekin still sounds sombre when remembering that night in Paris. At one point he likens the feeling of defeat, knowing it was the end of the great Super Leeds side, to being “like somebody had died”. Eventually, he settles on a different metaphor.

“It was a hell of a missed opportunity. It was the overall feeling that the team was coming to the end. That was the worst part of it for me. The team was probably going to break up and they hadn’t really achieved what they should have done — the missed opportunities in other finals, finishing second so many times, just the sheer weight of games. It was a bit like an unfinished dinner that you really, really enjoyed and you didn’t want it to end but you had to leave before you got to the pudding. Being a Leeds fan is built on heartache.”

But that doesn’t stop Ekin occasionally reminiscing with his friends who made the trip — some of whom still live in Boroughbridge — particularly when 28 May rolls around every year. Some of the group are sadly no longer with us, including Metcalfe, who passed away around twenty years ago but has been immortalised in Gerry Cranham’s photograph of him standing on a rail in the Parc des Princes while wearing his trademark balaclava, raising his fist with a bar scarf tied around the wrist. It’s an image of pure defiance. If anybody ever wants to know what it feels like to support Leeds United, show them that photo and ask them to imagine how Metcalfe felt in that moment.

It is also an image with a certain notoriety, having been used to adorn the cover of a book on Leeds’ hooligan firm the Service Crew, an association Ekin is keen to distance the lone wolf from, even if he could be “a bit of a lad” every now and then.

“It’s great that he’s become a bit of an icon,” Ekin says. “He would have loved it. But he didn’t go out to become that, he was just being himself. That was just Andy. He had nothing to do with the Service Crew. The Service Crew was far too normal for him.”